by Allan Topol
Yet here she was approaching her mother’s grave, weak in the knees, overcome by the grief that had shrouded her for the last twelve months, ever since a friend had pulled her out of a class in English literature at the Hebrew University to tell her: “There was a bomb on a bus...” She shuddered thinking about it.
She squeezed her arm more tightly around David as they neared the small gravestone. “Professor Bettelheim, you were wrong,” she mumbled to herself between clenched teeth. The last twelve months had been hell for her. She would dream about her mother and wake up in a cold sweat. For hours on end she had roamed the streets of Jerusalem expecting to find her mother, to learn that it was all a mistake, that Yael hadn’t boarded Bus eighteen that day, that the buyer from Saks Fifth Avenue she was supposed to meet in Jerusalem, to sell him furs from the kibbutz, had been detained in New York.
The buyer had wanted to meet Yael in Tel Aviv, but her mother insisted on Jerusalem because Daphna was there. That way she could have dinner with her daughter that evening after she finished with the buyer. Her mother had been so happy in those days. For the first time in her life she was happy. She had so much to live for. She...
Daphna couldn’t choke back the tears any longer.
They flowed freely. The gravestone was ten yards ahead, and they slowed their pace.
She had managed to finish the year in school, barely working, rarely going to classes. Professors liked her and felt sorry for her; they gave her passing grades.
She had known she couldn’t remain in Israel any longer. Suddenly, it had become too small for her. She had needed money to go abroad, and had spent the summer waiting tables at the Hilton in Tel Aviv, working as many hours as she could.
In September, she had left Israel and a lifetime of friends. She traveled in Scandinavia, where her mother had gone twice a year buying fur pelts for the kibbutz to convert into designer coats. Her mother had started the business for the kibbutz when oranges and grapefruits, their original economic foundation, became no longer profitable. In Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, Daphna had roamed the streets and visited fur dealers expecting to find her mother. If she saw a familiar woman’s form in front of her, she would rush up and accost the stranger, then back away apologetically.
In October she traveled to Paris and enrolled in the Sorbonne, studying world literature. She lived in a hovel on the West Bank…Left Bank…she always made that mistake. She was desperately trying to reinvent herself, to try to find a reason to get up in the morning.
The gravestone was dignified and small. Just her mother’s name, Yael Bat Avraham, and the date. Daphna did the math in her head. Forty-five years... far short of the biblical three scores and ten.
She released herself from David’s grip and stood with her hands folded in front of her. Tears flowed freely down her cheeks. Her body shuddered with pain.
She glanced over at David. He was kneeling, close to the stone. His face was in his hands, but she could hear his muffled sobs of grief. He had loved Yael, she thought. Daphna was happy that at the end, for the last three years of her life, her mother, this independent spirit, this hard-driving kibbutz leader, who had single-handedly forced the other members of the kibbutz to develop what became a profitable fur business, had found someone to love her. For the happiness he had given her mother, she would always be grateful to David.
In Hebrew eighteen was a lucky number. It meant chai... life. It wasn’t lucky for Yael that day.
Daphna knew that they were supposed to say prayers on the anniversary of Yael’s death. She didn’t know about David, but she wasn’t religious. She wasn’t sure if she even believed in God.
David was mumbling something softly. Maybe he was praying. If so, that couldn’t hurt.
For her part, Daphna knelt down and picked up a few pebbles. She placed them gently on the gravestone. They marked her coming. Her mother would know that she had been there.
The hot sun beat down on their bare heads. Tears flowed down her face faster than the sun could dry them.
David helped her to her feet. Then he enveloped her in his arms, letting her tears wet his shirt.
* * *
She offered to take a sherut from Haifa to Ben Gurion Airport for her return flight to Paris, but David insisted on driving her in one of the kibbutz’s old Ford pickups, which coughed and sputtered until they hit the open road.
Even with the windows down, it was stiflingly hot in the cab of the pickup. She lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the open window.
“When are you coming back?” David asked.
“I don’t know,” she replied weakly. “Maybe never.”
“You like Paris that much?”
“There’s nothing here for me. What can I do with a degree in world literature at the kibbutz?”
“You could always take over the family fur business,” he said, trying to lighten the mood.
When she didn’t respond, he added, “Or teach literature at a university in Israel.”
“Teaching’s not for me. At the end of the school year, I might go to New York, to Queens.”
He looked over at her. “Why there?”
“Why not? There are more Israelis in Queens than anywhere else except Tel Aviv. I’ll marry a rich American who plays football, drives a Cadillac and brings me breakfast in bed. What do you think about that?”
“You’ve been watching too much American television. That’s what I think.”
He wanted to help this troubled young woman, puffing intensely on her cigarette, who meant so much to him, but he didn’t know how. He didn’t know what to tell her.
“You know what’s weird?” she blurted out.
“What’s that?”
“I’m an orphan. I don’t have a single living relative that I know about.”
Immediately she sensed his hurt. “A blood relative, I mean. I shouldn’t have said that. I do feel close to you, David, but it’s not the same thing. You know.”
When he didn’t respond, she continued, “She would never tell me who my father was. Just that she would tell me one day. About all I know is that he was a military man, a war hero, a commander of a tank unit. He was married at the time. They fell in love when she was in the army. He would have gotten a divorce, she said. But he was killed in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 in a tank in the Sinai. Burned alive inside, when his tank took a direct hit. She was four months pregnant. So she came to live on the kibbutz. That’s absolutely all I know.”
She tossed her cigarette out of the window and paused to light another.
She smokes too much, he thought. I should tell her. But how can I, today?
“I could have half brothers and sisters,” she said bitterly.
He raised his eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“Well, if this tank commander had other children with his wife. She would never even tell me that. That’s the one thing I’ll never forgive her for.”
“That’s not fair, Daphna. Nobody should live their life as if each day will be their last.”
“What did she tell you about my father?”
He hesitated for an instant. “Only what she told you. One day she planned to give you the whole story.”
“When?”
“She didn’t say.”
From the sound of his voice, Daphna felt he was hiding something that Yael and told him, something she didn’t know, but grief had sapped her will to pursue it. “It’s too late now,” she mumbled softly.
He shook his head. Her pain was his pain. He was sorry he couldn’t help her.
“Maybe I’ll go to Russia and look up your family,” she said.
“I’ve got no family there,” he replied softly.
“What happened to your parents?”
“Dead. Both of them.”
With horror, she imagined his parents dying from years of forced labor in a Siberian work camp.
He looked at her gently. “Like you, I’m an orphan.”
At Ben Gurion Airport, she
grabbed her bag, resting between them in the front of the pickup. As she was about to jump out and head into the terminal, he reached under the seat and handed her a small box. “A present for you,” he said.
“What’s this?” she asked, surprised.
“Open it.”
Inside was a beautiful miniature chess set with the chessmen carved from ivory and onyx. “It’s the one we played with last night,” she said.
He nodded. “I want you to have it.”
She was taken aback. “But it’s your favorite. You said it was hand-carved in the time of Czar Nicholas II. It’s the most valuable thing you brought when you came to Israel. I couldn’t possibly take it.”
He looked at her beseechingly. “Please, it would mean a great deal to me.”
She searched his dark eyes. He was a nice man, this Russian. In the last year as she had gotten to know him, she had come to like him. Then she looked down at the chess set.
“I’ll take it under one condition,” she finally said.
“What’s that?”
“You’ll come to Paris and play chess with me there.”
“Or you’ll bring it back to the kibbutz, and we can play here.” She looked stricken. “Paris is fine. And in Queens, too,” he added quickly.
“You’ve been watching too much American television,” she said, trying to mimic his words and tone from a few minutes ago.
He laughed. “Go, or you’ll miss your plane.”
She tucked the chess set into her bag and hugged him.
He sat there and watched her walk away. She looked so much like her mother. Not just her face and the long blond hair, but the tall, thin figure that moved gracefully through the crowds milling in front of the terminal. She also had her mother’s peculiar distance. He had known Yael so well, and sometimes he thought he hadn’t known her at all.
A cop came over and tapped on the front windshield of the pickup. “Let’s go. Move on.”
* * *
Driving back to the kibbutz from Ben Gurion Airport, David felt a great gaping emptiness. The visit to Yael’s grave and the wrenchingly painful ride with Daphna had left him depressed.
He had loved Yael so much. Three years they had lived together as husband and wife. Three years—that was all. The best three years of his life, but so little time. What a shame. He knew that he should be grateful for those years, but he couldn’t. He was sorry there weren’t more. Sorry that she got on that bus. Sorry he didn’t get to Israel earlier. Sorry that...
Ah, what was the use. He had gone through all of that over and over again, grieving and crying for an entire month after her death, unable to think, unable to work, unwilling to eat. Then his grief had turned to cold fury and a desire for revenge. He wanted to know who was responsible for the attack, and if the legal system couldn’t impose punishment, then he would find a way himself.
Repeatedly, he had gone to Jerusalem seeking information, but to no avail. The most that Shin Bet or the Mossad had established was that the perpetrators came from outside of Israel and Palestinian-controlled territory. Polite bureaucrats had said, “We’re still working on the case. We’ll let you know if we have a breakthrough.” But they never did.
During this awful time, the members of the kibbutz consoled and supported him while always leaving him distance to mourn. The kibbutz was a community—an entity greater than himself, not perfect by any means, populated by people with egos and petty jealousies like any other society, but still something that on balance made life for him worthwhile. He had come to respect these people and their way of life. He was grateful that it was now his life as well.
What had surprised him was how these gruff kibbuzniks, most of whom had spent their entire lives on Bet Mordechai, had been willing to accept him as a newcomer. Perhaps, it reflected the measure of their love and regard for Yael. But he’d earned some of it on his own. As director of the High-Tech Center of the kibbutz in the last two years David had developed a computer software package for the automotive industry. He had already entered into a million-dollar-plus contract with Ford in Detroit. In the last six months, he had met with Toyota officials twice in Japan and Renault once in Paris. He was pessimistic about his chances with the French company, but Toyota was close to signing a two million dollar deal. That would mean a new dining room and maybe even a new swimming pool for the kibbutz.
At the next exit, he turned off the highway and onto the pitted blacktop road that led into the kibbutz. Bouncing along in the pickup, he passed the litchi trees that had been retained when orange and grapefruit groves had been destroyed for economic reasons, because of cheaper product flowing into western Europe from Spain and Brazil. Litchi, persimmon and other exotic fruits still found a lucrative market.
The road went up a hill. He passed the old kibbutz swimming pool, constructed on a small mound. In front, a magnificent view spread out before him. He could see the rest of northern Israel and well into southern Lebanon; to the right rose the rugged Golan Heights.
He parked the pickup in front of the main administration building—the original wooden structure—that marked the beginning of the kibbutz in 1952.
He walked across the dusty center courtyard to the spanking new cinder-block building that housed the High-Tech Center.
Pushing open the door, he nodded to Batya, who doubled as a secretary/receptionist. Curt as usual, and without so much as a greeting, she announced, “Gideon was here. He wants to see you. He said go right to his office. Nowhere else.”
David found Gideon, the director of security of the kibbutz, sitting behind a battered wooden desk in the security building, another makeshift shed twenty yards from the administrative building. He was reading the morning paper when David walked in. A founding member of the kibbutz, who had fought in Israel’s wars in 1948, 1956 and 1967, Gideon was well into his seventies.
David had grown fond of the wizened old character with creased, leathery skin and a mop of brown hair that stubbornly refused to turn gray. His mind was as sharp as a tack, and he loved telling stories about the country in the good old days. Gideon was also a fabulous chess player, and though David had improved noticeably in the last year while playing with him, he still hadn’t won a single match from the security director.
Despite his wooden leg, the result of an Egyptian land mine in the Mitla Pass in June 1967, Gideon got up immediately when David walked in.
“You’ve got a visitor,” Gideon said. “He’s waiting in the administration building.”
“A foreign customer?” David asked hopefully.
“No, a police detective from Haifa.”
David’s immediate thought was of Paris and Maria’s death after their dinner at Arpege. She must have told someone she was having dinner with him, and the French police had asked the Israelis to interrogate him, as a prelude to requesting his extradition.
With Gideon, he decided to tough it out. David looked puzzled. “Well, I was driving fast this morning. They must have picked me up on the radar.”
“No, it’s not that.”
“What, then?”
“He insisted on telling you himself. He wants to talk to you alone.”
David smiled. “But surely you dragged something out of him?”
Gideon nodded. “But of course.”
“And?” David held his breath.
“All he would say is that it has to do with somebody stealing dental records from Dr. Elon.”
“In Haifa?”
“Yeah.”
The news hit David like a sledgehammer blow to the stomach. His mouth went dry, and his heart began to race.
Then quickly he gathered all of the inner strength he could muster. Don’t panic, he told himself. Don’t show even a hint of concern. Gideon’s smart, very smart, and the policeman may be as well. Gideon’s also tied into Shin Bet and the Mossad. You’ve been here only four years. They still regard you as a foreigner. They won’t care what you say. They’ll be watching to see how you say it.
This day had to come. You knew it would. You trained yourself to deal with it. Now do it.
Gideon was staring at David. He was his friend, and yet he was still the director of security for the kibbutz. The next few seconds would be critical.
“I plead guilty,” David said his face lighting up with a smile.
“Guilty?”
“Yeah. I stole my dental records so that sadist won’t remember I’m a patient. He won’t be able to send me any of those notices to remind me it’s time for him to start drilling my teeth again.”
Gideon pretended to chuckle. He was a bad actor.
“I know why you’re laughing,” David said, playing along.
“Yeah, why’s that?”
“He’s taken out every one of your teeth already. He can’t do anything else to you.”
“That is certainly true.” Gideon opened his mouth to show a gaping hole on the right side.
David left the security building and walked slowly across the courtyard to Administration, trying to appear calm, moving at a normal pace. He didn’t dare turn around. He could feel the eyes boring into the back of his head. Gideon was watching him through the window.
* * *
David knew immediately that unlike Gideon, the detective wouldn’t even pretend to laugh. He was an intense-looking man in his late thirties, who spoke Hebrew with a South African accent, David deduced. He was dressed casually in a white shirt open at the neck and khaki slacks. His face was dominated by heavy brown-framed glasses with Coke-bottle thick lenses and a high forehead that gave way to thinning mud brown hair.
He had commandeered an office, and he asked David to sit across the desk from him. In front of the detective was a steaming mug of coffee.
David knew that the detective would do the interview by the book. And he did, first pointing at a tape recorder that he turned on, then introducing himself as Ephraim Goldberg, with a dour expression on his face. He crisply stated the time and date, carefully writing it down in a bound notebook. David decided he’d better play it serious. This wasn’t Gideon he was dealing with.